“It would help me a lot if you’d let me get you fixed for somewhere to stay tonight.”
“Why?”
“I feel like I should.”
She smiled. “Give me a good reason.”
“I have an apartment ten minutes’ walk from here.”
“I can’t stay in your apartment.”
“It’s not my apartment. I live uptown. This is an apartment, which I own. Furnished, but utterly empty. Nice-to-excellent view, depending on the weather. I’ll give you the key and the code for the security system. You can stay two nights, if you like. I’d invite you to stay longer, but my brother is coming into town Tuesday afternoon.”
She cocked her head, studying him. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
He reached into his pocket for his keys, selected one, and deftly wound it off the ring. “It’s just a few blocks.”
Allie reached for the key.
He moved it away. “I have a condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You let me walk you there.”
He wasn’t doing the Harrison Ford face, or the tight-mouth face, or even the post-almost-kissed face. His face was more like…well. Her dad’s, maybe. The one her dad would make when he would get up from the dinner table and say, Well, I’m just going to go out there and change your oil, Al. Save me the brownie corners.
Winston was probably a Good Guy. Which made her feel paradoxically uneasy, since after Matt, she was officially done with Good Guys, and possibly guys in general.
But then she remembered the Harrison Ford face, and the way he thunked that bottle of whiskey on the pinball machine.
Maybe, maybe, he was the other thing. The thing Elvira tried to tell her existed but seemed like a unicorn.
Maybe Winston was a Good Man.
The only way to find out was to make a decision and find out if it was a bad one later.
“You’re on.”
Chapter 4
They stepped up from the dark bar onto sidewalks scoured clean by the rain, the Village empty of tourists and daytime shoppers but populated by animat
ed knots of bargoers and determined singles making a beeline for the subway, their cab, their apartment.
Though Winston was ostensibly leading the way to the apartment, he trailed behind, towing her wheeled suitcase and enjoying the pleasant spectacle that was Allie, walking.
Her shoes clipped over the concrete. Her trench coat flapped open when the wind kicked up and she had to flatten her palm over her hat to keep it from blowing away. Her hips swayed from side to side, her purse banging against her upper thigh, her hands always moving as she talked, pointed, gestured, dynamic and alive when she swung around to ask him, “Didn’t we already pass that building?”
For a small woman, she took up so much space.
“Which building?”
She pointed. “The brick one.”
He studied it, but it looked like every other brick building to him. He had trouble differentiating architecture in America. Buildings that were supposedly old looked new to him, and they had little that seemed truly different, distinctive enough to remember. There were no Nelson’s Columns, no Arc de Triomphes, to help him navigate this city. Just skyscrapers and glass-front shops and indistinguishable brick churches.
“I don’t think so.”